Mateo Alemán

Origins and early life

Mateo Alemán was born in Seville in September 1547, the son of a prison physician, and his family was of converso Jews on the paternal side: the critical scholarship, and in particular Luis Gómez Canseco's edition of the Guzmán, states that his grandfather Juan Alemán had a documented run-in with the Inquisition. This fiche places him by descent, at the level of a named grandfather, and states plainly that Alemán was born and lived a Catholic; his converso origin nonetheless shaped his life, since it barred him from the offices he sought and left its mark on a book obsessed with honour, appearances and blood.

Work and career

He studied medicine and law, worked twenty years as a royal accountant and treasury inspector, was twice imprisoned for debt, and in 1593 conducted an official inspection of the mercury mines of Almadén where convicts and slaves worked in conditions he reported as murderous. In 1599 he published the first part of Guzmán de Alfarache, the confession of a rogue who has become a galley slave, alternating picaresque narrative with moral commentary.

It was an unprecedented success: some twenty-six editions in five years, translated into French, Italian, English and Latin, and more widely read in Europe than any book of its day except the Bible, so much so that a pirate second part appeared under a false name and Alemán answered with his own in 1604. Cervantes, who knew him, took the picaresque frame further in Don Quixote.

Later years

Refused permission to emigrate for years, Alemán sailed for Mexico in 1608, published there a treatise on Spanish orthography and a life of a Mexican archbishop, and died about 1614 in the New World.